The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  —Two hours? objected Sebastian.

  —Two hours before the ceremony, clarified the wedding planner—we’ll reconvene after for more shots on the lawn, when the natural light is best.

  —See? Not so bad, Dale said with brother-in-lawly affection—you’re all about Natty Light, right?

  Everyone laughed, even the wedding planner, and Dale couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t feel better about it. Their reaction had been instantaneous and authentic; he hadn’t caught the slightest whiff of sycophancy. Normally, in such moments, he keenly felt the warm swell of praise. It was not the particular exchange, but the absence of this swell, that, on the most important day of his life, still tingled in Dale’s mind forty-five minutes later as he posed artfully next to the ponderous library ladder supporting his bride.

  Vivien looked stunningly—stunningly—beautiful. Dale didn’t have the textile vocabulary to personally express it, but he very much liked the tulle of her gown, how the skirt seemed to float in cloudlike layers, the way it wrapped the slim nip of her waist and gathered to create a diaphanous illusion neckline. She hadn’t gone overboard with the rouge either, as brides so often did. He loved her hair. When she’d first seen him, she’d glowingly beamed—and so had he. But then he noticed the videographer, and felt awkward. Vivien reminded him to take care as he kissed her, so as not to disturb her makeup, and it seemed only thirty seconds later he was being told where to stand and how to position his chin.

  The editorial series in the library was followed shortly by portraits in the conservatory, traditional photos in the ballroom, and an illustrative shoot on the terrace. Family members and the wedding party were cycled in and out for the group shots in what seemed to Dale every possible permutation, as if they were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge or something. It was such a production Dale almost felt compelled to apologize to his parents, for whom signifiers of great wealth always held an air of ostentation, even when executed with graciousness.

  Shortly before the guests started to arrive, Dale and Vivien were again led to separate quarters, as if to preserve the illusion—Dale was not quite sure for who—that when Vivien walked down the aisle he would be witnessing her nubile splendor for the first time. The groom’s room was small and smelled of sandalwood and primogeniture; the first movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto played at low volume. It had the air of a matrimonial bullpen, the lingering anxiety of previous grooms mixing uncomfortably with Dale’s own. This compounding anxiety of cliché might well have been stronger had Dale seemed to himself more like “a groom” than merely an imposter. There is often a certain surrealism to events of great anticipation, but never before had Dale felt more like an echo of someone else’s music, the actor of a part that had not been written for him.

  The now-familiar click of the wedding planner’s sensible heels could be heard on the other side of the door.

  —Hurry up please it’s time.

  —Are you ready? said Gage reflexively, because it was the thing your best man was supposed to say.

  How to answer such a question? You know, Gage, I’m really not sure. I don’t feel like myself; it’s hard to believe that what is happening right now is actually happening to me. So you could say I have conflicting thoughts in regard to the state of my readiness. In many ways I felt readier yesterday. Maybe months ago, too. That certainly wouldn’t do. He cringed at the thought of a canned response, though, at Definitely! or Ready as I’ll ever be! But his modulated off-script options all sounded even more fraudulent in his mind; the solemn ones were too grim, the nonchalant too flippant. He feared his voice would crack in any case. For while Dale wasn’t sure whether or not he was “ready,” there was genuine emotion in his wavering. And so he remained silent, nodding tensely with a tense little smile.

  The Whipplepool Country Club was the kind of property irresistible to Veblenite brides. Its winding entry drive was marked by little more than a weathered sign reading PRIVATE PROPERTY, and was so overgrown with thickets as to resolutely deter those unfamiliar with the subtle signifiers of exclusion. The steep wilderness persisted for a little over a mile before a lush, sportive paradise presented itself, all the more beautiful in contrast to the nettled drive. The club’s immediate grounds had been landscaped in the Anglo-American manner of much pecuniary emulation, the green so thoroughly and sympathetically integrated with the natural environment as to suggest that the smooth, dense turf regularly mowed itself. The Greek Revival clubhouse, imposing and symmetrical, seemed to exacerbate this impression, its sharp white lines throwing the verdurous hills in relief. The stateliest view, and indeed, the vantage point that, if the weather was fine, nearly all couples chose for their ceremony (Dale and Vivien included) was the front terrace, creating an aisle from the two-storied columnar facade to a floral arbor overlooking the golf course, as though a window gave upon the sylvan scene.

  Dale straightened his dinner jacket in the shade of the arbor, his eyes fixed back on the facade with its French doors, its soaring balcony windows reflecting the evening sky. His groomsmen fanned out like matryoshka replicas to his left, standing arranged by height in that distinctive three-quarter turn to the side. To Dale’s right presided Julian Pappas-Fidicia, who, between the sumptuous clerical stole draped over his navy tuxedo and the velvet slippers with embroidered emerald-eyed tigers on them, looked less like a traditional wedding officiant than a preppy Liberace. Dale’s parents had already been seated in the first row, as had Vivien’s mother and the readers. The chamber group concluded one cinematic piece and began another. Two-hundred-some necks turned in unison with the music’s swelling cue. The French doors opened. There was Audrey; Jacqueline; Grace. The opening thematic melody fell into false retreat with the countersubject’s introduction as the bridesmaids made their way to the arbor, mirroring the stance of the groomsmen. Julian pushed his round tortoiseshell glasses up the bridge of his nose with ecclesiastical majesty. As the returning crescendo of the main theme approached its climax, Vivien crossed the threshold on her father’s arm. There were audible gasps. It didn’t hurt that it was the sort of music so inherently moving it had the ability to override even mediocre dramatics. In the context of Vivien’s touchingly nervous aesthetic radiance, the sensory effect was overwhelming to the point of disorientation. For the briefest of moments, blinking his eyes, Dale thought she was someone else.

  Julian’s welcome remarks were both warmer and more professional than Dale might have imagined, his characteristic wit and pomp adapting surprisingly well to ritual appropriateness and genuine formality. If Julian hadn’t so charmingly and with remarkably little reference to himself elucidated the nature of his personal association with the couple, Dale was certain their guests would have thought he had officiated weddings before—which, Dale remembered, with poorly timed and unwelcome memory, he had. Wes and—

  The aposiopesis hung in his mind by sheer force of will. But thinking about not thinking about a person is merely another way of thinking about her, and while Dale may have successfully refused to allow the progression of vowels and consonants that composed her name to enter his inner monologue, he could not suppress the associated sentiment. Paige Sinclair finished reading from the story of Pygmalion (the only brief excerpt from the Metamorphoses Vivien could find even tangentially fit for a modern wedding). As Anderson Gregory took Paige’s place and began the second reading, Dale’s gaze floated past him, back up to the soaring balcony—

  So they lov’d, as love in twain

  Had the essence but in one;

  Two distincts, division none:

  Number there in love was slain.

  Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

  Distance and no space was seen

  ’Twixt this Turtle and his queen:

  But in them it were a wonder.

  There—there was a person up there. A woman—

  So between them love did shine

  That the Turtle saw his right

  Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight:

/>   Either was the other’s mine.

  Property was thus appalled

  That the self was not the same;

  Single nature’s double name

  Neither two nor one was called.

  The sensation of hyperarousal was so intense it threatened to shut down Dale’s entire sympathetic nervous system. He imagined Diana on the balcony, frantic but beautiful—windswept—wondering if she’d made it in time, screaming his name with desperation. He imagined his own steps, slow at first, measured, his feet wary of obeying him, then breaking into a run to join her, racing through the French doors as she flew down the stairs to meet him, the pair of them toppling some flowers or a Ming vase or something in the foyer as a gaggle of guests chased after them—

  Reason, in itself confounded,

  Saw division grow together,

  To themselves yet either neither,

  Simple were so well compounded;

  That it cried, “How true a twain

  Seemeth this concordant one!

  Love has reason, reason none,

  If what parts can so remain.”

  Dale recomposed himself with Herculean concentration, hoping the tsunami under his arms hadn’t seeped through to the outermost layer of his dinner jacket. At Julian’s instruction, Dale turned toward Vivien and managed to clasp her hands. The woman on the balcony raised a six-thousand-dollar camera, to capture the picture in panorama.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  Much has been said of the tendency for hardship to reveal the true nature of a person. Political turmoil, economic strife, war—times when the precarity of life, or at least the precarity of life as we know it, hangs in the balance tend to foster the honesty of urgency, stripping away pretense and affectation, neutralizing the will to dissimulation, exposing who we are at the core. As an old dog once observed: adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant. The same might be said of eliciting cowardice or monstrosity. The broader point is rather that whatever lies beneath becomes difficult to mask. But, when for years the leader of the free world has been a measured, responsible adult of the progressive enterprise, realizing incremental gains and emblematic of more significant ones, this urgency, particularly for fundamentally comfortable people, has the tendency to dissipate. It is a notable feature of peaceable times that the face is considered secondarily to the mask. Even to ourselves it becomes an abstract kind of hieroglyph. The literature surrounding this phenomenon is almost as well documented as its opposite. To quote one of the great poet-philosophers of our own time, what am I ’posed to do when the club lights come on? It’s easy to be Puff, but it’s harder to be Sean.

  It would be a mistake to channel the relevance of this reflection in Dale’s direction alone. For all her pride and care in the outward presentation of her hymeneal rites, Vivien had her own underlying misgivings about becoming a McBride. The name itself, for starters. She didn’t love it. She never considered keeping her own, because doing so would have felt like an exposition of disappointment, and besides, made far too much of a “feminist statement” for her taste. But she couldn’t quite relieve her mind of the impression that McBride didn’t have the ring of Kennedy or Rockefeller or Vanderbilt, or Range. Why Diana had hung on to Whalen Vivien could not understand, beyond the assumption that people must call her Mrs. Range often enough anyway, and the pleasure of correcting them—of conspicuously throwing away such an advantage as if it were nothing—seemed, while obnoxious if you really dissected it, superficially symbolic of equality and independence and that sort of overtly liberal general wokeness Diana Whalen would deem consistent with her personal brand.

  Vivien’s more serious reservation only developed in the aftermath of the Young Members’ fiasco. Not that she still suspected Dale of any hanky panky reaching farther than his own imagination. The explanation of the postcard was too ridiculous not to be true, and Vivien continued discreetly punishing him for it mainly for purposes of precedent. No, it wasn’t the inciting image of Dale’s red hand that lingered with Vivien from that night, but of Wes, chasing after Diana—the single-mindedness of his gait, the unilateral devotion scripted on his fucking Fibonacci face. In the ensuing weeks Vivien scolded herself for ever worrying he’d told Diana anything, and yet it was worse, somehow, to think he’d been so thoroughly unfazed by their tryst. This new lens of anxiety proved a remarkable motivator for embellishing her wedding, though. She wanted Wes to tangentially see all the pictures of it on Instagram, and decompose in regret.

  Not until the ceremony itself did Vivien begin to internalize the fantastical folly with which she had been filtering so genuinely momentous an occasion. Vivien had prepared herself for her nuptials as one prepares for a performance, almost the same way she would have prepared for a curatorial lecture, and was entirely blindsided by the raw, emotional vulnerability Dale displayed. Once it became clear he wasn’t actually going to faint, Vivien was highly touched by the threat of it. As he pronounced his vows, there were tears in his eyes. Vivien saw herself through these tears, and tried to suppress her guilt that she was not exactly the same woman Dale was seeing. It occurred to Vivien how obliging he’d been in the actualization of her wedding vision, that he’d styled himself to her specifications, that he looked straight out of GQ. He was precisely the groom she had always imagined, in every way save one.

  —Eek! the wedding planner squealed in overwrought delight after Dale and Vivien signed their marriage certificate. It’s official-official now! Yay! Okay, time to head to the lawn—

  —Oh, forget the staged lawn photos, Vivien said, almost spontaneously. We should go enjoy the cocktail hour. I want to have a good time.

  Vivien smiled sweetly at her husband, and his show of gratitude stirred something in Vivien as they returned to the terrace. Not romantic love exactly, no, but a pleasant sense of mutual understanding, of social relief; a marital shelter, almost, which was not without its psychological benefits. Dale clasped Vivien’s hand and squeezed it tight.

  —My beautiful bride, ladies and gentlemen! He introduced her triumphantly, crossing the threshold to thunderous applause, chaotic and choreographed in equal measure.

  He jolted his wife’s hand in the air in the manner of a referee with a victorious prizefighter. Vivien smiled extra-wide, iconically, imagining the photojournalist-style image of her iconic, extra-wide smile, glossily smiling again at all of her friends from the cover of their first Christmas card.

  Dale and Vivien had limited further interaction as the sun sank behind the green, bathing the terrace in oblong, crepuscular light. Not that they were avoiding each other intentionally; they were merely too caught up in the canons of decency associated with being a bride and a groom—of greeting and thanking, of air-kissing, selfie-taking—though from a distance Dale could see that Vivien was indeed having a good time. She had that characteristic flush precipitated by others’ unmistakable admiration, which no development in the history of cosmetics has quite been able to emulate. She allowed herself a second glass of champagne, and he could sense even her will to aesthetic control dissipating amidst her merriment. She still coached him clinically through their first dance, but when Dale muffed one of the moves anyway, Vivien laughed it off with generous nonchalance. Julian was somewhat less charitable.

  —Congratulations, he said, leaning over to Dale as Vivien danced with her father, on making it through that.

  —How bad was I?

  —Somewhere between Gage the summer he tore his ACL and white girls in the hip-hop class at Equinox.

  —You don’t go to Equinox.

  —Au contraire, said Julian. Equinox is my favorite place to go to the bathroom. Their bathrooms alone are worth the membership fees. I’m serious! They’re that nice. Not to mention how hard it is to find a bathroom in New York City. But Equinoxes are everywhere.

  —I was gonna say, I can’t exactly see you doing extensive squats.

  —I should think not. I’m not training to give bir
th in a third-world country.

  Audrey Wimberly looked aghast, and Dale was almost grateful to receive the band’s peremptory summons to dance with his mother. By the time he made it back through the throng of well-wishing side conversations and returned to his seat, the caterers had already cleared the first course, though Dale couldn’t remember having eaten anything. Vivien’s father and Grace and Gage gave heartfelt toasts, the last of which was shockingly well constructed and reminded Dale how much he genuinely liked him. (“Obviously I helped him with it,” Julian boasted later.) As the dinner began to break apart at the margins, the band reannounced itself at tempo with that Bruno Mars wedding song, the one about spontaneous elopement that immediately gained obligatory playlist status at weddings carefully planned well in advance. Its impossibly catchy xylophone cut through the twinkle of conversations and cutlery in a way that made even Dale’s extremities tingle with the urge to dance. He gamely drew Vivien to the floor, but she migrated into a throng of her girlfriends somewhere during the next song, and they lost track of each other again in the whirling circles of convivial activity until it was time to cut the cake.

  —Don’t get any on my face, okay? Vivien reminded him.

  —No, no—of course not.

  There must have been two or three unstructured celebratory hours thereafter, but they passed with dreamlike brevity, as if he’d only read the abridged versions of them, the conversations and alcoholic beverages refracting to the point of perceptual cliché. Dale could recall crouching on the ground to (Shout) a little bit softer now-ow, and Julian launching into an unexpected panegyric on the thoroughly mediocre romantic comedy Something Borrowed and how it “actually changed [his] life,” but these were not the sort of recalcitrant memories Dale had anticipated forming at his wedding, and when the band signaled that the next song would be the last song, and the wedding planner retrieved him from the dance floor to collect his personal articles from the sandalwood waiting room so that they might be preloaded into the Jaguar, an empty feeling, a sort of loss almost, overcame him. The penultimate song for everyone else had been the ultimate for him, and he hadn’t realized it.